My favourite part of the Kunstkamera is the Lomonosov Museum

My favourite part of the Kunstkamera is the Lomonosov Museum. The collection of objects connected with the life of the great scholar and with his age is housed in the tower in the central part of the building, which was restored to its historical appearance only in the 1940s, almost two hundred years after the fire of 1747 that had damaged it. Here stood the first Russian observatory, the mineralogical and physical cabinets, and the Academy library, in which Lomonosov himself laboured. During the war the building caught fire for the second time, but the blaze was put out. It was here that it was decided to gather the objects that mark milestones in Russian science. The museum was created largely on the basis of the work of Academician Vernadsky, who headed the Commission on the History of Knowledge and worked on the Museum of the History of Science and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and of Academician S. I. Vavilov, chairman of the Commission on the History of the Academy of Sciences, set up in 1938 under the Academy Archive. It was Vavilov who conceived the Lomonosov Museum as early as 1938, but the idea would be realised only by 1949.